Call For Papers: The Anthropology of Nonviolence: The Humanist Tradition in Russian Culture

 Call For Papers

The Anthropology of Nonviolence: The Humanist Tradition in Russian Culture

The journal New Literary Observer announces a call for submissions for a new special issue dedicated to the humanist tradition in Russian culture.

Send your submission (name, affiliation, title, and an abstract of 400–500 words) to nlo.editors@nlobooks.ru. Deadline: 1 July.

In the last century, the idea of nonviolence was connected with the names of such people as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In this context, nonviolence is usually viewed as a tactic or strategy of mass political and religious movements. In our opinion, however, the idea and practice of nonviolence is broader. It is embodied not only in political and religious projects, but also in everyday habits and rituals that go as far back as written history, and perhaps even further. Ideas of nonviolence can be found in myths and in the ethical teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and other religions. Oresteia by Aeschylus ends with Athena establishing the court and thus ending the vicious cycle of retribution. In the Trojan cycle of myths, when Achilles wants to attack Agamemnon, the same goddess tells him, “Do not hit him with your sword. Hit him with words.” The Old Testament principle of “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is replaced by “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Such stories express the intuition that civilization as such is premised on the limitation of destructive tendencies or their transformation, and thus it is necessary to include elements of nonviolence.

What could the anthropology of contemporary culture tell us about nonviolence? Why does society (and more broadly, civilization), which over the course of millennia has practiced violence and finds reasons for it, nevertheless periodically return to nonviolence as an alternative ethos, modus vivendi, and modus operandi? Reflections on the nature and boundaries of violence has long been a subject of discussion on the pages of the New Literary Observer (see, for instance, the special issues “Anthropology of Closed Societies” in No. 100 [2009]; “The Post-Soviet as Postcolonial” in No. 161 and 166 [2020], and others) and in its public spaces (see, for instance, the 27th Bannye Readings “Anthropology of Violence: State, Society, Culture,” 2021). Today, the question of value, effectiveness, emancipatory power, and forms of the practice of nonviolence seems to be more relevant than ever for Russian humanities scholars.

The questions that we are proposing to reveal insights into in this special issue:

1. What is the difference between violence and nonviolence? What categories do non-violent practices belong to? How could the history of concepts (“good,” “mercy,” “humanity,” etc.) be thought of from a research perspective for the study of nonviolence?

2. Can non-violent practices successfully be opposed to explicit (physical, symbolic, etc.) and implicit (everyday, routine, normalized) violence? Are there examples where violence was stopped by the logic of nonviolence? Can nonviolence be an effective alternative to violence, and what are its effective strengths?

3. What can Russian history tell us about nonviolence? What potential for nonviolence does Russian culture have? How have ideas of nonviolence been embodied in Russian social practices? How have societal practices of nonviolence been reflected in cultural and artistic sources?

4. Are we able today to counter an equally routine, everyday, and demonstrative violence with a new humanistic ethos? On what political, historical, and philosophical grounds could it be formed and in what limiting values can it be conceived?

5. There is a well-known thesis about the inaugural abilities of violence: many states and other unions consider their history to start with a war or a revolution. Does nonviolence have such a inaugural ability?